


We Could Do Some Damage

by isozyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 05:33:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3163133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isozyme/pseuds/isozyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In any system, no matter how cleverly made, there is a certain percentage of energy that bleeds away as heat.  Efficient systems capture some of this energy and feed it back into forward progress.  Interstellar war is not an efficient system, and what it bleeds out is left for other creatures to snap up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Could Do Some Damage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [graveExcitement (arachnids)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arachnids/gifts).



_The United Human Front sent the first starships back lifeless, riddled with black mold.  Drifts of weightless spores hung lace-like and still in the dead holds._

_The empress ordered all ships compromised by human bioweapons slingshotted into decaying orbits around distant stars._

*

Deep in the dried-up holding tanks of a converted nitrogen mining ship, a confrontation unfolded.  One human and one troll stood pressed up against the hull wall, hard vacuum to their backs and the well-armed troll crew of the ex-mining ship arrayed in front of them.  Beyond the small group, lit by the weak red glow of maintenance lights, the empty tank yawned cold and empty, dark as space.

Rose held up a biohazard-grade 4 vacuum-sealed vial, clasped primly in one hand.  Her brightly lacquered fingernails gleamed in bright contrast to the matte plastic and sooty interior.  Behind her, Terezi tapped her laser pistol against the hull in impatience. 

"Friends, enemies, compatriots," she said.  "I trust from your enterprising spirits and educated appearance that you can comprehend my next gambit from context clues."  The translator strapped to her neck clicked and whirred.  The crew across from her tensed and gripped their weapons tighter, but their captain smiled and waved them back.

"We don't have a helmsman," the captain said, lowering her gun and shrugging her heavy shoulders in a show of nonchalance.  "Blackpitch won't do shit-all to us, gal."

Rose rolled her eyes and sighed.  "I was hoping I wouldn't have to spell it out for you.  This encounter would have been so much more satisfying if the threat could have stayed veiled, the knowledge of how truly fucked you are adding tension beneath the surface while we spoke prettily around it."

Terezi kicked Rose in the ankle for overselling it.  "What she means is: when the quarantyrants get ahold of your ship and test it for oh-so-illegal and dangerous mold, boom, presto chango!  You're on a short course for the nearest star with no return ticket."

The captain chuckled.  She had a good, hearty voice and sturdy, scarred-up hands.  Rose felt a twinge of regret, listening to her laugh: had things gone differently they could have ended this over strong tea sweetened with sticky condensed milk, and left as business partners.  Instead: guns and mold and this echoey metal grave.

"Aw sweetheart, didn't you hear?" the captain said.  "There's a fix for blackpitch, has been for nearly a sweep.  Two human solar years, almost exactly.  The war's a-turning and your bargaining chip's a bit bulgeless, if you know what I mean."

Rose's regrets dried up like liquid helium on a hot stove.  Apprehension hit her instead, thin and cloying like walking unexpectedly into a spiderweb.  Terezi stopped banging her gun on the hull and went bowstring-taut behind Rose's shoulder.

"Seems like our little bluff got called," Terezi said.

"It did," said the captain.  Her laser pistol would sear flesh, but the heat would slide right through metal and spill harmlessly into the cold of space beyond.  She'd aim for the face and horns, where even shallow burns could cripple.  The troll on her left had a hunk of rusted-up gas motor affixed to a length of lead pipe -- the kind of thing that stove in human heads and cracked open troll exoskeletons without risk of sending a physical bullet through a pressurized hull.  Troll space weapons fell into two types: pounding and searing.  A blade in an unskilled hand would slide off the chitinous exoskeleton of an adult troll.  A physical bullet could punch through a hull.

"Maybe you shouldn't have come to steal arms and uranium from us without a better endgame strategy!  You're up against professionals, little league, and the clock is running down." the captain said.

Rose shifted her grip on the vial, and reached out with a different kind of weapon.  Followed the photons, and saw from the corner of her eye the exposed wires feeding electricity to the red maintenance fluorescents.  "I hate sports metaphors," she said, and killed the lights.

The room crashed into darkness.  One of the crewmen yelped and was noisily shushed.  The captain called for order, and lights, someone turn on the nook-fisting lights.  A laser pistol flashed, the hot bolt burying itself in the hull some three meters from Rose's head.   

Rose felt Terezi grab her upper arm, her fingers cool and suede-soft.

The ex-mining crew died in the dark, captain-first.

*

_In any system, no matter how cleverly made, there is a certain percentage of energy that bleeds away as heat.  Efficient systems capture some of this energy and feed it back into forward progress.  Interstellar war is not an efficient system, and what it bleeds out is left for other creatures to snap up._

*

"It's worse than we thought," Rose called as she walked into the cramped ship's kitchen.

Terezi brushed soot off her hands, and blew out the tiny flame she was using to char food scraps.  When ground fine and tipped carefully into intimidating vials, charcoal dust was indistinguishable from blackpitch spores.  "We just have to find a ship with a helmsman next time," Terezi said.  "It will be fine!  Some fake propaganda blackpitch cure isn't going to mean anything for a ship thats systems away from the nearest Alternian colony."

"That wouldn't be a problem, but a human-engineered cure riding on the back of a ceasefire will be," Rose said.  "Pull the crew together."

The word _ceasefire_ made Terezi raise her eyebrows.  "That's interesting."

"Pull the crew together in the arms room -- there's space for everyone since we tore a hole in that imperial cruiser by lobbing every explosive we had at it."

Terezi leaned back against the oven door.  "Make me."

"Don't flirt, Pyrope," Rose said.

"Worried what it'll look like if the XO on your oh-so-proper ship is screwing the captain?  Or are you afraid you can't compete with Vriska?  She's got a head start on you for sure, but I like your chances."

Rose scoffed.  "I'm worried you'll make a fool of yourself."

"That true?" Terezi leaned forward, so the loose shirt she was gaped loosely around her neck, revealing hard grey sternum and a cheery red shoulder holster strapped tight against her skin.

"Crew, arms room, ten minutes," Rose snapped.

"Yes sir," Terezi said, and brushed past Rose out of the kitchen.

When Rose said _crew_ what she meant was the crew that mattered.  They could be counted on a single set of human fingers, and did not include the fifty-odd human and troll souls Rose relied on to keep her boat running.  Vriska and Aradia, with their notched-up horns and savage grins, for muscle (physical and psychic, respectively).  Jade Harley for robotics and navigation.  Terezi Pyrope for tactics.  Sollux for propulsion, Kanaya for intracrew relations, her half-brother and mother for scouting.

The arms room was a tight fit, even emptied as it was of torpedoes and asteroid mines.  The nine of them sat on boxes of handheld pistols from the mining ship.  Rose stood on a lead-lined concrete crate of uranium with the top of her head brushing the torpedo racks.

"The United Human Front wants a ceasefire," Rose said.

Kanaya smiled, and clapped her hands together sharply once.  "Excellent," she said, "things will be very calm.  I will tell the crew they may reduce the third watch by half."

"No, not excellent," Terezi barked.  "No interstellar war means no interstellar supply chains!  No interstellar war means no skyrocketing demand for various and sundry large and small arms stolen from those supply chains."  Her fists were clenched tight -- determination or concern.

"Ah," Kanaya said.  "Well then."

Rose cleared her throat.  "The UHF will cease all biochemical warfare and provide the Imperial Fleet with an effective anti fungal.  The Alternian force will stop inverting human colonial moons.  Both sides will turn their focus to eradicating pirates and expansion into new, non-competitive systems."

"A fragile chance for peace emerges," Terezi said gravely.  

Rose leaned forward over the crew, gripping the torpedo rack above her for balance.  "We need to kill it before it kills us."

*

_Space battles are like submarine warfare: the enemy is above you and behind you and beneath you.  Quiet behemoths slide through the dark, tokens in a game of awareness and silence._

_Xenoconflict is like fighting an infection.  The enemy is inside you and it does not understand which parts you need to live, so it carves a space blindly.  The enemy does not know your loves or your viscera but it can destroy them both._

*

Rose gathered intelligence and long-range missiles and thought about how to best ruin peace.

They landed on a hot, half-terraformed planet with acid seas to air out the crew and pick up foodstuffs.  The place was mostly colonized by humans, but a few scrappy trolls made their living alongside them.  The UHF funding for terraforming had run out decades ago, but the planet limped along, surviving without progressing.

Rose's core crew of nine splintered, busying themselves spending their wages at secondhand stores and greasy food carts.  Vriska yanked Terezi off towards a stand shaded by a pitted blue tarp, where they sold fried tubers.

Rose sat alone on a rock.

Along the shore of the corrosive sea chittered small alien birds, half-insectoid, half-feathered.  Rose wondered if their ancestral stock had originated on Earth or Alternia.  This many generations removed, there was no way to know without a science degree.  Vriska threw a bit of tuber fry at one, and it gulped the morsel down with a mouth that opened in too many directions.

Jade and Kanaya joined Rose on her rock.  Jade offered her a paper cone of shaved ice.  It was salty-sweet and tangy.

"How's your grand plan to take down the ceasefire going, Ms Captain?" Jade asked.  

Rose sighed and put a hand to her forehead.  "It's hopeless, Madame Engineer," Rose said.  "I'm afraid I will never triumph over the ending of a long war of attrition."

Jade chuckled, then considered Rose more seriously.  "Do you have all the materials you need?"

Rose nodded.  "I'd like if you looked at the self-targeting torpedoes I traded for.  You could determine their maximum range better than the joker who handed them off to me."

"They'll come after us," Jade warned.  "This is not a low-profile thing, Rose.  This may set two massive armies on our tail."

"It's our only option," Rose said.

"Is it?  Or is it just the most direct and painful one?"  Jade smoothed her pants over her thighs with one hand and carefully licked a drip off the paper cone of her shaved ice.  "You have a thing for victory via self-destruction."

On the beach, Terezi cocked her fist back and tried to punch Vriska in the nose.  Vriska caught her fist in one hand and they snarled at each other for a moment.  Then they dropped it, laughing at each other and kicking sand.

"She's too caught up in that girl," Kanaya said, pointing at Terezi.  "Could end in tears."

"They're having fun," Jade said.

"I want it to stop," Rose said.  "I want it to stop _now_."

Kanaya raised her eyebrows at Jade and drew a clubs sign in the grit around the rock with her toe.  Jade nudged her with her shoulder and scrubbed it out, but not before Rose saw it.  "It's because I'm concerned as a captain," she protested.

"Mmhmm Rose, you're definitely concerned!" Jade said.

"My first priority has to always be my crew working efficiently," Rose said.  "Nothing else."

*

_When the Alternian fleet catches a human ship, they kill everyone on board and strip the ships for parts.  This is the most economical way to deal with an enemy._

_When the UHF catches a troll ship, they strip the guns and engines, attach an unmanned tow-rocket to it, and send it back to Alternian space.  This is the humane way to make sure an enemy does not come back to nip at your heels._

_When smugglers and pirates catch any ship at all they ask for what they want.   Once they receive it, they send the ship on its way.  Sometimes they want crew, or parts, or fuel.  Sometimes they want directions, or stories, or news.  This is they way to do business when you do are not afraid of one side more than the other._

*

The medical room was a closet with a stool, lined with cabinets of supplies.  Rose used it to think when she felt conflicted, most comfortable pairing her existential anxiety with the sharp tang of antiseptic in the air. The air in her captain's quarters was musty.

She also enjoyed the startled and uncomfortable faces of every fresh crew member, unused to the tricks to the ship's controls, looking for bandages for crushed fingernails.  The older crew knew that a shredded t-shirt made sturdier bandaging for nasty cuts, and that small dings would heal better in the open air.

Terezi crashed into the medical room, surprising them both.  "Rose!  Hello.  I would like to leave now, I think."

Rose grabbed her by the shoulder, digging her fingers into the tender join between two exoskeletal plates there.  "No, stay."

"I didn't know you liked me that way," Terezi said, and Rose shook her, not ungently, looking for a wince.  Terezi hissed through her teeth and put a hand to her side.

"What happened?" Rose asked.

Terezi lifted her shirt to show a small angry burn in the shape of a curved steam pipe.  "Slipped on a grate like a chump.  Vriska won't let me hear the end of it, and now you won't either."

Terezi wasn't a rookie who would bang herself up on a maintenance hatch or fall down a ladder.  She was too sharp to make dumb mistakes like this.

"Vriska is making you careless," Rose said.

"You're not my moirail," Terezi said, and shook off Rose's hand.  Rose let her hand hover over Terezi's shoulder, not touching but close enough to feel body heat, had she been human.  Terezi's blood ran only a few degrees warmer than the air around her, so Rose felt nothing.  They hung like that, neither willing to break and run, for several breaths.

Rose changed the subject.  "I've been thinking about retiring."  

"You haven't."

"No, I haven't.  But I've been thinking about getting my head staved in with a pipe, or getting pitched out the airlock, or watching my own crew come at me armed with rocks while armed with only my vocabulary and a good shouting voice, and retiring seemed like a good euphemism.  Excuse my lack of clarity."

"All of those situations seem unlikely."

"Still.  It would be you, holding the crew together, if that happened.  Do you know where the books are?  The passwords to them?  Do you know the weak spots on the hull and which cheek to turn to the enemy?"

Terezi held her breath for a moment, and Rose was sure she was thinking of the answers to each of her questions, nodding slightly as she checked her knowledge.  "Yes," she said eventually.

"How many other crew members could?"

Terezi shrugged.  "Jade?  Sollux maybe."

"Wrong on both counts, see me after class for remedial people-managing.  Just you.  So if you're going to do things that distract you from your position as my second in command, you tell me first."

Rose wanted to ask Terezi what she thought about using long range missiles to kill the human envoy carrying the blackpitch cure.  She wanted to ask if this was the right direction.  But it felt wrong.  Rose couldn't ask for so much at a time; it would bare too much soft and vulnerable skin.

Later, during the second watch (Terezi was safe in her bunk, sleeping off a double shift), Rose found Vriska sitting in the mess, reading a well-thumbed paper book of engine specs.  There was a tin mug of coffee by her elbow.

"Vriska, walk with me," Rose said.

Insultingly slowly, and only after a sip of her doubtless-cold coffee, Vriska rose.  "Yeah, cap?"

Rose took them to the back half of the ship, back into the mechanical depths of the nuclear reactors that drove it from star to star.  She didn't look back at Vriska, but could hear her steps, heavy on the metal gangways, behind her.

When they were sufficiently out of earshot of the rest of the crew, Rose whirled on Vriska, trapping her in a corner between a cooling tank and the hull.  "I keep you on this ship because you'rea _useful_ brute, Serket.  Do you want me to change my mind?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Vriska said.

"Stop the thing with Terezi.  Don't touch her.  She's mine."

Vriska bristled.  "I don't see how that's your business."  She squared her shoulders and tipped her chin forward, standard troll body language for _look how big I am, don't fuck with me_.  Vriska was big: tall and lanky, with forked, serrated horns.  Rose could break all the bones in her hand punching Vriska's smug face before Vriska got so much as a blue-black eye, but she was captain, and shouldn't have to.

"Everything on this ship is my business.  If you stop getting rations, that's my business.  If you go on six watches in a row, that's my business.  If you walk into a firefight and, whoops, your big scary gun has no ammunition, that's my business.  Don't touch Terezi."

"Whatever," Vriska said, horns still set forward, shoulders still tense.

Rose felt her lungs stiffen with jealousy, but all she could do was walk briskly away.

*

_Surface area increases more slowly than volume._

_This puts hard, mathematical limits on how long things can grow at a steady pace._

*

They caught the human embassy ship on passive radar.  It was small and fiercely shielded, but Rose thought their missiles could jar it hard enough to at least delay the ceasefire.  A few months of waffling while the humans reconsidered would be long enough for both sides to rack up fresh atrocities, the kind of thing that made peace unthinkable.

Rose shooed everyone off of the missile command deck to make her final round of calculations.  She hoped the missiles would hit.  She hoped that with enough small rockets making course adjustments, their paths could not be deconvoluted back to find their tiny ship.  She hoped --

"Don't," Terezi said, behind her.

Rose jerked, startled.  Terezi reached around her and clicked the missile targeting computer off.

"Terezi, what -- "

"You never know when the right course of action is to run smack into the sword and when it's to duck around it.  You didn't talk to me about this enough."

Rose didn't know what to say, so she said nothing.

Terezi tsked and sniffed, crossing her arms so she was folded up tight -- a perfect package of energy and drive.  "What do you want, Rose?"

"I want what is best for my crew," Rose said.

Terezi uncoiled like a spring.  "Predictable non-answer!" she said, pressing one finger into the air above Rose's chest.  She was close enough that Rose could see the creases between the delicate plates of her facial exoskeleton.  "I know what you want, Rose Lalonde, because I know how you act around things you want, and at the moment there are two things.  The first: you would rather go down in a blaze of glory than adapt your strategy."

"The second?" Rose asked, not daring to lean forward into Terezi's finger.

"You want to kick Vriska Serket right in the globes," Terezi said, snapping her fingers under Rose's nose.  "Consequently, you are falling on the sword of glory and eeling around your hilarious human version of ashen quadrant confusion, which is perfectly backwards!  Isn't that hilarious?"

"I don't think it's hilarious," Rose said.  "What do you advise?"

Terezi smiled.  "First -- sell those long range missiles.  Find us a new business."

"Smuggling goods and refugees over the new treaty line?" Rose suggested.

"Exactly."

"The crew will have to agree."

Terezi scoffed.  "No they won't.  You're the captain, and I'm your XO.  If they want to disagree, they'll keep it to themselves or eat airlock."

"About the second thing," Rose said.  "You and Vriska and I."

"I changed my mind!" Terezi said.  "I don't want to talk about it!  Terezi saves the day from bone-headed missile plans, hurrah, give her a grub-flavored lollipop for her endless troubles."

With appalling timing, Vriska opened the door to the missile command deck.  She narrowed her eyes at the developing scene.  "Terezi?  What're you two -- "

Rose punched her in the nose.  

It made the bones in Rose's hand creak, and made Vriska snort and take two steps backward.  Terezi took the chance to slam the door in her face.

"I have been so jealous, I want to cut her fingers off every time she touches you," Rose said.

"I had noticed that," Terezi said, smug and unrepentant.  "That's not particularly healthy."

"I don't really care," Rose said, and grabbed Terezi's loose shirtfront with one hand.  The other (still sore from the impact with Vriska's face), she slipped into Terezi's hair, and kissed her like she was starving for it.

*

_A steep gradient takes maintenance.  One side must amplify, the other must dampen.  Even a cliff made of limestone will slump in time._

_Water and methanol, apart, hold more energy than they do together.  When they mix, they sigh the energy out in gentle heat --  hot enough to soothe cold hands clasped around a glass jar, not hot enough to burn._

_The border between Alternian and UHF territory is steep, and the maintenance falls to two interstellar powers with long lists of priorities.  Where the divide breaks, the two mix, and pockets of space become warm enough to live in._


End file.
